Why today, of all days?
by Cecily Plum
Summary: There are bad days, and then there are ultra-mega-bad days. And today was one of those days. Now, Felicity had had ultra bad days before, but why did it have to be today? Backstory: Felicity has never met Oliver Queen, but she has met the Hood. He likes breaking into her apartment and getting her to do his tech work for him, in return for saving her life once.


**Happy St Patrick's day to everyone else, and happy birthday to me! *happy dances wildly*. This is a random thing I wrote in five minutes, in honour of my B'day. Hope you enjoy. I know it's a little late, but I've had stuff going on, okay? well, enjoy the randomness.**

_Backstory: Felicity has never met Oliver Queen, but she has met the Hood. He likes breaking into her apartment and getting her to do his tech work for him, in return for slightly saving her life. Once. He saved her life once, and normally she was happy to help, but not today of all days._

Why today of all days?

Felicity was exhausted.

There had been several attempts to hack the mainframe of QC, and, whilst she normally enjoyed technological war fair, today's hackers had been both skilled and persistent.

And morning people.

She had been called in for 05:00 that morning in order to help reinforce the firewalls she had been in the process of updating, an unfortunately mammoth task, which had led to the weaknesses in their security being more obvious than usual, leading to her working through her lunch.

At about 2, she had been looking forward to being able to relax slightly, but of course that wasn't going to happen, as some idiot up in accounting decided that it would be a good idea to open a spam attachment, leading to her having to go up there and remove a Trojan from the computer.

Then, of course, she just had to bump into the head of finance of her way down - literally - causing his boiling hot coffee to go all over her, only to have him guilt her into coming and sorting out some computer troubles, which meant she had had to crawl under his desk. She had been able to feel his eyes on her butt as she fiddled around for all of two minutes. It would have been quicker, but even with that lecher (he had to be at least sixty) staring at her, she just couldn't leave the cables in such a mess.

When she got back to her office, she had found a letter (who writes letters anymore, especially in the IT department?) from her supervisor asking her if she wouldn't mind taking up Mrs Greene's work, as she had gone into labour in the time Felicity had been upstairs, leaving a couple of projects, which needed to be done for the next day, unfinished.

All of this had resulted in a very grumpy Felicity getting home to her too-small apartment at 11 in the bloody evening, a whole 18 and a half hours after leaving.

Dumping her stuff by the door, all she wanted to do was collapse into bed, a simple ending to a frightful day. She was so tired, she almost didn't notice the terrifying green figure standing by her open window. Almost.

"Argh!" She screamed when she saw him, more out of frustration that fright. "No, whatever it is, not today. It can wait. My bed cannot. Not today, of all days. I had to get up extra early this morning to go to work for a problem which made me miss lunch, then had to go sort out Frank in accounting's computer because, no matter how many times we say it, there is always one idiot who decides opening spam attachments is a good idea, then I got coffee spilt all over my shirt - a shirt that I have yet to change out of, by the way - by Mr James, who then ogled my backside whilst I fixed a basic problem for him, then I had to stay late - missing dinner - because Melissa was too stubborn to take maternity leave, so we couldn't hire someone to cover her work, so I had to do it, and normally I wouldn't complain so much, but today is supposed to be a good day damn it!" She shouted, finishing up her rant.

The Hood hadn't moved during the entire thing, but Felicity could have sworn she saw the tiniest of smirks under his hood.

Pulling his arm from behind his back, he held out a small box wrapped in dark green paper, with a fuchsia pink ribbon. He took a cautious step forward, before bending down and placing a quick kiss on her cheek as he pressed the box into her hand.

"Happy Birthday, Felicity." Then he turned and fled out of the window, quickly vanishing out of sight.

Stunned, it took Felicity a moment to actually look at the small box in her hand. Too small to be jewellery or perfume.

Opening it, careful not to tear the paper, Felicity gasped. Inside was a very high-tech, very new processing chip which she was fairly certain was not on the market yet.

Maybe today wasn't such a bad day after all.

Finite.


End file.
